Natalie Portman: Little Miss Perfect lets her dark side show

'Black Swan’ sees Hollywood’s most grounded starlet forsake Harvard for a
world of obsession, cruelty and eroticism, reports William Langley

By the age of 13, Natalie Portman was well on the way to stardom – an achievement that didn’t necessarily augur well for her future. Hollywood’s chronicles of misery are thick with the tales of teeny supernovas – Drew Barrymore, Macaulay Culkin, Lindsay Lohan – who find that a stolen childhood leaves a hard-to-fill hole in anyone’s life.

Yet onward and upward soars the perky Miss Portman, with the usual explanation being that she is brainy enough to avoid the pitfalls. Another reason, though, is that the actress has neatly hedged her bets in fashioning an indie-chick persona that plays irresistibly to the arthouse crowd while holding on to the yummy ingénue image via mass-audience movies such as the Star Wars prequels.

Not any more. Portman’s controversial new movie, Black Swan, signals a permanent departure from all that she has done before. Acclaimed by many critics as a masterpiece (and condemned by some as exploitative hokum) it tells a tale of obsession, cruelty and eroticism set in the world of ballet. Natalie plays Nina, an aspiring ballerina, in thrall since she was a moppet to her doting but deranged stage-mother (played by Barbara Hershey). When a new production of Swan Lake is to be cast in New York, the eye of director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) falls upon Nina. But while she is perfect for the role of the virginal White Swan, can this frail, unworldly girl – prone to psychosexual delusions and seemingly on the brink of mental disintegration – bring forth the darkness needed to play the Black Swan, her evil twin?

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, riding high on the unforeseen success of The Wrestler – to which this is, in a sense, a companion piece – the film has been tipped in America for a haul of Oscars, most likely at the expense of The King’s Speech. British critics have been less certain, with the Guardian calling Aronofsky’s film “richly, sensually enjoyable” but also “bonkers”, and this newspaper’s own Jenny McCartney complaining of its “roaring high camp with cruelty in place of comedy”.

Almost all the reviewers, however, have been awed not only by Portman’s performance, but by the stupendous physical ordeal the role involved. Einstein described ballet dancers as “God’s athletes”, perhaps because no other job on earth requires the same cosmic levels of strength and fitness. “The dance training started a year before the film,” says Portman, “with a two-hour session every day. Six months later we ramped it up to five hours a day, and for the last two months it was eight hours a day, and I was also swimming a mile a day. It hurt a lot; your body is in constant pain.”

Although she had taken ballet classes as a child, she was – by performance standards – soft and rusty, and had to lose 20lb off an already skinny form before shooting the dance sequences. There were other challenges, including a scorching girl-on-girl sex scene with her dance rival, Lily, played by Mila Kunis. Not that Portman, now 29, appears fazed: “How do you get guys to go to a ballet movie?” she asks. “How do you get girls to go to a thriller? The answer is a lesbian scene.”

Good thinking – and from a brain unusually capable of it. Natalie was born in Jerusalem, the only child of Avner Hershlag, an Israeli fertility specialist, and his American wife, Shelley. The family moved to Washington DC when she was three, and later to New York, where they settled in a small town on Long Island. The Hershlags took their daughter’s education seriously, steeping her in languages, history and culture. Reassured by her conspicuous cleverness, they assumed a distinguished academic future was waiting. But one day, when Natalie was 10, she was spotted leaving a pizza parlour by a Revlon make-up agent, who suggested she should become a model.

The encounter led, in a roundabout way, to a meeting with a theatrical talent agency, which found her an understudy role in an off-Broadway musical, Ruthless!, about a girl scheming to land the star part in the school play by murdering the lead actress. The following year she made her movie debut in Leon, French director Luc Besson’s excursion into American noir, playing Mathilda, an orphaned pre-teen girl befriended by an ageing hitman.

While her performance, rich in Lolitaesque overtones, won plenty of praise, it also raised many eyebrows. “Always at the back of my mind,” wrote the prominent American critic Roger Ebert, “was the troubled thought that there was something wrong with placing a 12-year-old in the middle of this action. It seems to exploit the youth of the girl without really dealing with it.”

For the film, Natalie abandoned Hershlag for her grandmother’s maiden name, Portman – hoping, she claimed, to protect her family’s privacy. Even so, when Leon came out, “a lot of weirdo letters” came in; which, if nothing else, served as a lesson in the power of popular culture. Fortunately, her parents were there to see her through it. “They give her a very solid, generous centre,” says Mike Nichols, who directed her in Closer (2004).

It was that support that gave her the confidence to abandon the acting business for Harvard, against her representatives’ advice, where she spent four years reading psychology. “I’d rather be smart,” she explained, “than a movie star.” Nothing wrong with a good degree, of course – but the problems began when Natalie decided to go all erudite on the rest of us.

First there was the vegan crusade. In a lengthy magazine tirade against the world’s meat-eaters, she compared factory farming to “misogyny, racism and sexism”. Then there was her attempt to solve the Middle East crisis. “I wanted to get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation and peace movement. So I called Queen Rania of Jordan to try to collaborate on something.” She’s also discussed Haiti with Hillary Clinton, Afghanistan with Richard Holbrooke and met Obama at the White House. All suspiciously Hollywoody, for an actress who once preferred to keep her distance. And last year, she moved to live in Los Angeles. “I didn’t think I’d like it,” she says, “but I’ve been surprised.” That’s what celebrity does, even to the brightest.